I finally have my first really effective danger room set up, with my military achieving legendary levels quickly in various combat skills, even while invasions are turned off. Given that I'm using 10 training spears per trap, and have something like 20 upright spear traps (with resettings pressure plate, o'couse), I've lost a few dogs, cats, kids, and babies .. but the room is engraved, so apparently that's okay to my dorfs. They also are getting attached to cloaks like crazy, which I've not seen before (only weapons for the most part until now).
I also have an archery range setup in the same room, with only marginal overlap between the melee and archery training area ... partly through only designating 1 archery target as a range to cover the area. I've setup my militias to carry bolts - metal for combat, bone for training - plus quivers, and added both "individual choice - melee" and "individual choice - ranged" weapons to their equipment/uniforms.
It's only early on with this change, so I was wondering if this will have the effect of training my legendary melee fighters with crossbows too? That's my ideal effect - I'd like them to be jacks of all trades so they can take on essentially any invaders. I know dual wielding doesn't really happen, but I was hoping they'd willing change between melee weapons and ranged depending on how I deploy them.
I may have overlooked the answer on the wiki, but I thought I'd check with others for their thoughts. I guess I could be risking encumbrance issues, which I haven't really seen to date, or maybe even a Holistic Wrestler scenario of beating enemies to death with their backpack (or crossbow), but it'd be nice to have all-rounder militia. Certainly I've observed marksdwarves learning into melee skills, but I'd essentially like to make this work in reverse.
As a side note, I've found references to obsidian swords being just as good as steel, and references to them being relatively useless compared to any metal. I imagine that the latter is correct, but just thought I'd check